Yingqi Li, Chief Network Architect and Senior Manager, China Telecommunications Corporation is speaking at the 3rd annual Signaling Focus Day, taking place on the 23rdh June 2014, at the Amsterdam RAI, Netherlands. We speak to them about the signaling issues affecting its LTE network rollout.

China Telecoms has launched LTE in over 100 cities – what are the main challenges you are facing as you manage your upgrade program to LTE and how long will it take to complete?

The main challenges we have faced are very practical. The first was acquiring new sites for our base stations, and the creation of environment protecting standards for our 4G equipment. Technically we also had to manage the interoperation between LTE and CDMA2000 network. It took nearly ten months to complete the first phase of our network development.

You have launched on TD-LTE but are also looking at FD-LTE. Why are you designing a hybrid network?

The main reason for China Telecom designing a hybrid network is to fully monetise the potential of all the frequencies. TDD frequency allocation was prior in China, whilst the LTE FDD system has the advantage of having a global industrial chain.

You’re taking part in the Signaling Day at LTE World Summit 2014. What are the key challenges posed by signaling issues for China Telecoms?

Smartphones are becoming more and more popular, and smartphone users are always consuming more signalling resources than feature phone users and data dongle users. Compared to the way we previously modelled the design of the network, signalling volume has increased at a faster rate than data volumes. This change should be fed back and applied to how equipment is configured, though the evolution of equipment is always more delayed than expected.

What impact are new services such as M2M, cloud, and OTT, having on your network compared to standard web data usage?

OTT services, especially the instant messaging (IM) applications, have had a very deep impact on mobile networks. IM applications such as QQ, WeChat and Weibo always require long-lasting data links, yet with low data volumes, which leads to signalling for controlling and scheduling b3coming exhausted very fast.

What are your plans to support roaming on LTE, both for your customers and customers roaming in from other networks?

For our customers roaming out, we will primarily rely on C2G roaming. We are also looking at other solutions for LTE network roaming and in future we plan to also provide roaming services on LTE.

The 3rd annual Signaling Focus Day is taking place on the 23rdhJune 2014, at the Amsterdam RAI, Netherlands.